As a young teacher, I'm always looking for ways to make myself better at what I do. Something I read will hopefully help push me this year.
I'm not typically one to make new years' resolutions. I find it cliche, and I tend to not keep them anyway. The whole lose-weight thing may actually happen this year thanks to my new favorite toy, the Wii Fit, and its daily reminders of how heavy I've become since high school ("That's obese!" Thanks, Wii Fit. At least I got you for Christmas so I have money for the therapy I'll need after you've completely dismantled my self esteem. But I digress.).
One thing that I and all teachers do - or at least I hope they do this - is spend a little time every year trying to hone their craft. This shouldn't just be a new years' resolution, of course; we owe it to the kids to do all we can to make them a little more knowledgeable, a little more curious, and a better citizen.
As I thought about this the other day over a cup of coffee and a mountain of research papers to grade, I thought of a pretty famous teacher - Pat Conroy. This veritable poet laureate of South Carolina is one of my favorite authors. I read Beach Music my freshman year of high school and I was captivated by his tales of the South and of a hopelessly dysfunctional family (the latter has certainly hit home a bit more over the past few years). But why did I think of him as a model teacher? Some of you are probably aware that Pat Conroy taught English for awhile after graduating from The Citadel, and that his experiences were partially the basis for his book The Water Is Wide.
Teachers are often spoken about with reverence in Conroy's writings, perhaps never so much as in The Lords of Discipline, his story of coming of age at a fictionalized Citadel in the 1960's. In it, the protagonist, Cadet Will McLean, puts forth what he calls his Great Teacher Theory:
I developed The Great Teacher Theory late in my freshman year. It was a cornerstone of the theory that great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart.
A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom.
Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well.
I can't think of anything better in my profession that being the teacher that Will describes, and as teachers we should aspire every day to be that teacher to at least one student. Can we touch them all? No, that's probably unrealistic. But we can touch the ones that have that fire - that desire to learn all they can - and I can only hope that one day, a student will look back and feel that I truly made an impact on them.
So, that is my resolution as 2009 begins. I hope I can transcend the bureaucracy and No Child Left Behind and all that other amazing stuff about public schools and keep the Great Teacher Theory in mind. I want to let it motivate me toward being the best teacher I can be. At least the Great Teacher Theory won't call me fat.